Dr. Robert Hoppock, 93, Pioneer In Field of Vocational Guidance

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Published: August 17, 1995

Dr. Robert Hoppock, who had such a tough time finding his niche in life that he devoted his career to making it easier for others to find theirs, died on Aug. 5 at a nursing home in Vista, Calif. As the first professor of counselor education at New York University, he is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field.

Dr. Hoppock was 93. His daughter announced his death this week.

Trained guidance counselors are such a staple at high schools and colleges that it is easy to forget they are a comparatively new feature of the education landscape.

When Dr. Hoppock was growing up, they simply did not exist, not at his high school in Lambertville, N.J., or even at Wesleyan University, from which he obtained a degree in economics with no notion of what to do with it.

Among other things, he once recalled, there was no "Directory of Occupational Titles" and no "Occupational Outlook Handbook," voids he eventually helped fill through his own extensive research and voluminous writings, including the books "Job Satisfaction," and "Occupational Information."

In his own quest for a career, Dr. Hoppock was given so much bad advice, followed so many false leads and worked at so many jobs he loathed that when he finally stumbled onto something he enjoyed -- teaching -- and discovered the embryonic field of vocational guidance, he vowed to make it his life's work.

As he put it in a 1967 essay, "I decided that if other people had as much trouble as I had in learning what occupations were open to them, maybe there would be a place in the world for someone to make it a little easier for future generations to get this kind of information."

The field was so new and so undeveloped that when he finally got a job in 1927 teaching a ninth-grade course called vocational guidance in Rahway, N.J., he organized the New Jersey Vocational Guidance Association to provide a semblance of professionalism.

His work with the association led to a job as assistant to the director of the Carnegie Corporation's National Occupation Conference, an organization whose pioneering work in studying and forecasting employment trends in the 1930's has been largely taken over by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Dr. Hoppock, who received a master's degree in educational psychology and a doctorate in educational research from Columbia, became a major figure in the study of occupations.

It is a measure of his precocious social thinking that in 1937, a generation before Betty Friedan, he made headlines by observing: "There is no sound psychological reason why women should cook meals, wash dishes, launder clothes and clean house."

After helping to organize the N.Y.U. department of guidance in 1939 and becoming its first chairman, he made headlines again when he took his counselors-in-training on field trips to offices and factories so they could learn about the world of work firsthand.

Dr. Hoppock was a consultant to the Department of Labor and the United States Office of Education, as well as to major corporations and several state education departments and the school system in Manhasset, L.I., where he lived for 50 years.

He retired in 1972.

He is survived by a daughter, Margaret Joan Bedell, of Vista, and three grandchildren.